WorldCat Search API
Developer-level Access to WorldCat - for bibliographic holdings and location data
Status: Production
Search WorldCat and retrieve bibliographic records for cataloged items, information about libraries that own the items and links to online catalog records when available.
What you get
- Information about books, videos, music and more in WorldCat
- MARC XML or Dublin Core content for OCLC records
- Geographically-sorted library information (institution, name, location and an OPAC link) in request for a specific record (ISBN, OCLC Number)
- Records in standard bibliographic citation formats (APA, Chicago, Harvard, MLA, and Turabian
- Production usage requires subscriptions to OCLC Cataloging and FirstSearch
- Commercial developers please contact the Business Development group to gain access
Who can use it
Qualifying Institutions
Interested in commercial use of this service? Contact us.
Usage Limit
Initially 50,000 queries a day. Can be raised by request
Query protocols
SRU, Open Search
Record formats
MARCXML (SRU), Dublin Core (SRU), Atom (OpenSearch), and RSS (OpenSearch). JSON options for lists of nearby libraries (holdings)
Authentication methods
- Developer Key
Frequency of Update
Daily
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